I have been watching The Tudors, a rollicking historical adventure series on Fridays 9pm on BBC2. I am a huge fan of that period of history and my personal heroine has always been Anne Boleyn, a much maligned woman who single-handedly caused the English Reformation and gave us the monarch as Head of the Church, instead of the Pope.
The historical inaccuracies within The Tudors can be intensely irritating for a purist like myself but I can understand the reasoning behind some of the errors. The most glaring one is the combination of Henry VIII's two sisters, Margaret and Mary into just one - Margaret, who the programme makers fictitiously married off to the aging King of Portugal because they had already had Henry meeting Francis of France in the splendid spectacle of the Field of the Cloth of Gold... thus, ruining the true timeline.
In reality, his elder sister, Margaret, was married when she was 13 to the King of Scotland, who was about 30. It was a diplomatic alliance to bring peace with the Old Enemy north of the border. After over ten years of marriage in which Margaret conceived six children (although most of them did not survive beyond infancy), King James promptly tried to invade his brother-in-law's country, whilst Henry was himself out of the country attacking France. He was killed at the battle of Flodden Field, leaving Margaret a pregnant widow trying to navigate the treacherous waters of Scottish politics and rule in her only surviving son's name.
Henry's younger sister, Mary, was forcibly married to the aging King of France, who was 30 years her senior, despite the fact that her affections lay elsewhere. He died after only a few months of poking his lovely teenage bride. She then had to live in seclusion for another two months to ensure that she was not pregnant, all the time being courted by the new young King, the womanising Francis I, who was desperate to bed her but dare not for fear of being supplanted on the throne by his own offspring.
After the required period of mourning had expired, she eloped with her true love, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the best friend of her brother, Henry VIII. In all the romantic novels of the time, it is said that, when she agreed to marry the King of France, she exacted from her brother the promise that when Louis died, she should be allowed to marry whomsoever she chose. Naturally, the King had forgotten this and was furious at the loss of an important bargaining tool in his international diplomacy. He banished them both from Court, although he later relented because he missed his friend and his favourite sister. It is a wonderful love story in itself and they had three children together. They were also the grandparents of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, who later became Queen for nine days due to the political ambitions of her father-in-law which lost both of them their heads.
The writers of The Tudors could have completely ignored Margaret and just followed Mary's story and called her Mary but, since Henry's elder daughter (the future Mary I or Bloody Mary) was also called Mary, it might have confused those less familiar with English history.
The final episode of this series (or Season Finale as you Americans insist on calling these things) starts off with Henry (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), so desperate with desire for Anne Boleyn, for whom he has now been waiting for several years, that he is wanking very convincingly into a covered pot held for him by his servant! On BBC2 at 9.01pm! What is the world coming to :)
It ends with him no nearer to his divorce after four years of legal wrangling and their desire getting the better of them in a leafy glade. Clothing is thrown off dramatically, she rides him bare-breasted as he fondles her. Then he is on top, thrusting into her passionately and you can tell that the pinnacle is drawing near when he suddenly announces 'I'm going to come', at which point she says 'You mustn't' and pushes him off her. All very cheesy - the limp, stilted dialogue has been a bit hard to take in places and I hope the writer will address that in the next series.
I must also complain about the rather strange inclusion of a homosexual relationship for the composer Thomas Tallis but I guess they needed to get all types of sex in there to appeal to everyone in the audience.
It was Rups with his piece on anti-erotica which got me thinking about my own relationship with sexual literature which directly relates to the above series.
My first experience of sex in books was 'Murder Most Royal' by Jean Plaidy. It was about Henry VIII's relationships with Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Nothing too bawdy, just a lot of heaving breasts with faces buried in them and women getting their heads cut off because of the accusation of adultery. Jean Plaidy could do non-erotic sex very well and it certainly piqued my interest in romanticised historical bodice-ripping type sex, which I'm quite sure had/has an effect on my interactions with men even today. As an 11-year-old, I was very susceptible to the concept of holding out for the one you loved and loving until death, but also the idea of dying for love.
I avidly watched the television serial 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' with Keith Michelle and, later, the film. There was also one of my favourite films of all time 'Anne of a Thousand Days' with Richard Burton (the best actor ever with the sexiest voice) and Genevieve Bujold, who epitomised how I imagined Anne Boleyn - her appearance, her mannerisms and her French accent. That film focussed on the passion of the love story, the dynastic implications of the need for a male heir, the machinations of court politics which destroyed their love and, finally, the jealousy that caused the King to have the woman for whom he had given up so much murdered.
We also have to remember that the child of that liaison, Elizabeth, inherited so many of their personal talents that she went on to become the greatest Queen in our history, but also experienced great personal torment when it came to the men she loved and she was never prepared to totally give herself to anyone. This phobia can only have come about from the terrible example she had witnessed - her mother's relationship with her father.
My fascination with the whole story has never waned and, although I moved on to more books about other characters in that period and also the same time in French history where things were even less repressed, I always return to it when there is a new book on the subject.
The problem with Anne Boleyn is that we know so little about her. So many of her memories were expunged in a great purge when the King married Jane Seymour. Papers, relics, portraits - all destroyed because no one wanted to admit to having had anything to do with the disgraced adulteress, the enchantress who had cuckolded the King. A few things still remained - a small number of portraits that were hidden away by the remaining members of the Boleyn family, some of the letters Henry and Anne exchanged in their courtship (which had been stolen and found their way to the Vatican), the entwined initials H and A worked into the framework of a palace ceiling or as part of a clock or in some overlooked bedhangings.
There was also a great book that I read recently by Eric Ives with new information which has shed new light on the real woman. Rather than the witch with a sixth finger and unpleasant mole on her neck who bewitched a King, we see the large number of charitable donations, the fervent believer in the New Faith, the intelligence and bravery in the face of a phalanx of enemies who had determined upon her destruction.
Philippa Gregory in her book, The Other Boleyn Girl, puts forward the theory that Anne Boleyn was actually unfaithful to the King in a desperate attempt to try to conceive a child in the face of her knowledge that he was becoming unable to get an erection (possibly due to his syphillis?). The story goes that she slept with her homosexual brother, became pregnant and miscarried of a malformed child. There is a film of this book due out shortly which should be interesting.
Reading historical romances encouraged me to start experimenting with my own writing. I first put pen to paper and realised that I had literary pretensions with the start of a novel. Yup, it was about the adventures of Anne Lea, fictional Countess of Essex who won the devotion of the married King Kevin of England and ended up having her head cut off when he fell in love with someone else. I'm blushing just thinking about the hideousness of the whole thing... but, hey, in this blog you get all my confessions so I might as well let go of that one. Fortunately, the exercise book containing this tome did not survive the cull when I threw away my childish fantasies and moved into my own flat.
When I was in my mid-teens, I was distracted away from history for a while.
I had discovered Harold Robbins and modern sex.
My friends and I used to hang around the local bookshop at lunchtime on schooldays, flipping through the novels and holding books upside down by their spines to see which pages they opened upon. These were always the juiciest bits :)
I am ashamed to say that I was in with the wrong crowd at that time and was encouraged into the world of shoplifting. I'm afraid that 'The Pirate' was the first book I ever stole.
But, what a book!!!!
I can't remember the plot exactly but I know there was lots of swearing and the use of drugs - swallowed, sniffed and poured onto external body parts - to enhance sexual stimulation. I was also introduced to the words fellatio and cunnilingus. All completely alien things to my virginal eyes... but, boy, did I want to get out there and give them a go!
To this day, I remain imbued with a deep longing to feel champagne and some sort of fizzy powder (I imagine sherbet since I'm not into cocaine) poured onto my clit just to experience what it feels like.
Anyone care to elaborate on their own literature-inspired sexual fantasy?
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